Sol 1:16-17 16 Behold, thou art comely, my beloved; yea charming; Yea, our couch is luxuriously green. 17 The beams of our house are cedars, Our wainscot of cypresses.
If Sol 1:16 were not the echo of her heart to Solomon, but if she therewith meant some other one, then the poet should at least not have used הנּך, but הנּה. Hitzig remarks, that up to “my beloved” the words appear as those of mutual politeness - that therefore נעים (charming) is added at once to distinguish her beloved from the king, who is to her insufferable. But if a man and a woman are together, and he says הנּכך and she says הנּך, that is as certainly an interchange of address as that one and one are two and not three. He praises her beauty; but in her eyes it is rather he who is beautiful, yea charming: she rejoices beforehand in that which is assigned to her. Where else would her conjugal happiness find its home but among her own rural scenes? The city with its noisy display does not please her; and she knows, indeed, that her beloved is a king, but she thinks of him as a shepherd. Therefore she praises the fresh green of their future homestead; cedar tops will form the roof of the house in which they dwell, and cypresses its wainscot. The bed, and particularly the bridal-bower (D. M. Z. xxii. 153), - but not merely the bed in which one sleeps, but also the cushion for rest, the divan (Amo 6:4), - has the name ערשׂ, from ערשׂ, to cover over; cf. the “network of goats’ hair” (1Sa 19:13) and the κωνωπεῖον of Holofernes (Judith 10:21; 13:9), (whence our kanapee = canopy), a bed covered over for protection against the κώνωπες, the gnats. רענן, whence here the fem. adj. accented on the ult., is not a word of colour, but signifies to be extensible, and to extend far and wide, as lentus in lenti salices; we have no word such as this which combines in itself the ideas of softness and juicy freshness, of bending and elasticity, of looseness, and thus of overhanging ramification (as in the case of the weeping willow). The beams are called קרות, from קרה, to meet, to lay crosswise, to hold together (cf. congingere and contignare). רחיטנוּ (after another reading, רח, from רחיט, with Kametz immutable, or a virtual Dag.) is North Palest. = רה = .tse (Kerı̂), for in place of רהטים, troughs (Exo 2:16), the Samarit. has רחטים (cf. sahar and sahhar, circumire, zahar and zahhar, whence the Syr. name of scarlet); here the word, if it is not defect. plur. (Heiligst.), is used as collect. sing. of the hollows or panels of a wainscoted ceiling, like φάτναι, whence the lxx φατνώματα (Symm. φατνώσεις), and like lacunae, whence lacunaria, for which Jerome has here laquearia, which equally denotes the wainscot ceiling. Abulwalîd glosses the word rightly by מרזבים, gutters (from רהט, to run); only this and οἱ διάδρομοι of the Gr. Venet. is not an architectural expression, like רהיטים, which is still found in the Talm. (vid., Buxtorf’s Lex.). To suppose a transposition from חריטנו, from חרט, to turn, to carve (Ew., Heiligst., Hitz.), is accordingly not necessary. As the ת in בּרותים belongs to the North Palest. (Galilean) form of speech, so also ח for ה in this word: an exchange of the gutturals was characteristic of the Galilean idiom (vid., Talm. citations by Frankel, Einl. in d. jerus. Talm. 1870, 7 b). Well knowing that a mere hut was not suitable for the king, Shulamith’s fancy converts one of the magnificent nature-temples of the North Palest. forest-solitudes into a house where, once together, they will live each for the other. Because it is a large house, although not large by art, she styles it by the poet. plur. bāattenu. The mystical interpretation here finds in Isa 60:13 a favourable support.